Essays

The category of Prose and Things will be filling up swiftly as I detail my reading and writing journeys this fall. It's the second day of school and I'm already up late trying to complete my reading for the lesson tomorrow. Not only am I reading every line, every word and every pause, but I am also writing notes, notes on ideas and observations that I am expected to share with the class in an intelligent, coherent manner.

I am enrolled in the Creative Non-fiction workshop, a class for which I had to submit a writing sample in order to be selected to be among 19 others. 19 students who are all older than me, and probably armed with more experience and better (ie. mature) writing styles, and perhaps even more literary competence. Nevertheless, I shall do all my readings, prepare clever things to say in class and plan my essays to the smallest detail. I shall attempt to avoid looking like a fool.

Among my esteemed classmates - an ex-editor of Harper's Magazine, an editor of a business magazine, a writer who has written in Arabic for the past six years, a Newsweek correspondent who has spent the past eight years in Moscow, a fellow who was on the Peace Corp in Russia, and several second year MFA students. I am the only first year MFA student, and probably the youngest. (I seem to be the youngest wherever I go. If not that, then the shortest or the quiestest or the noisiest.)

Tonight's readings - "Shooting An Elephant" by George Orwell, "Death Of A Pig" by E. B. White and "Six Days: Some Rememberings" by Grace Paley. All personal essays, all well-structured, all evocative writing that any literary fan would devour in seconds (okay, minutes). I empathized with ol' George, who was only doing his best to avoid looking like a fool in front of a couple thousand of Burmese people. I near wept at the death of Mr. White's pig and envied (the kind of envy of another person who's had a more interesting life) Grace Paley's six days in prison, a result of publicly protesting the Vietnam war.

Creative non-fiction is the fourth (the newest) genre, after fiction, poetry and dramatic writing. Creative non-fiction combines elements of all three. It can use the narrative structure of fiction, the deep, lovely language of poetry and sections of lines exchanged between real-life characters set in an everyday or exotic location. Creative non-fiction can be memoir-like, it can be made of mostly research, or it can sound like a drawn out poem, but it is always personal. Personal in a good way, not in the egoistic sense. The writer lets us glimpse a part of his or her mind and memories and knowledge. He does not - must never - flash us with indecent amounts of himself. (That kind of thing is left to weblogs.)

More on creative non-fiction as I dig deeper into the course and its readings. The semester has just begun. And I must now bury myself momentarily with these three essays, just as E.B. White's pig was buried with a chance worm and a fallen green apple, although the poor pig would have no need to take notes on the connection between the worm and the apple. Mr. White has already done so for the pig and for us - "the worm (legendary bedfellow of the dead), the apple (conventional garnish of a pig)". A dead pig, that is, slaughtered for the dinner table.

Posted by Monoceros at September 4, 2003 1:02 AM